Caste Matters

Author: Yengde, Suraj

• I grew up in relative poverty in the early part of my life, until I reached sixth grade. After that my family was downgraded to a level below poverty, officially known as Below Poverty Line (BPL).

• The Tenth Planning Commission fixed seven ‘parameters’. Kerala has nine parameters, while Haryana has five parameters to identify families in regard to ownership of land and access to employment, education level, status of children, sanitation, roof, floor, safe drinking water, transportation, food, ownership of colour TV, fridge and so on. In addition, there is an income cap which varies and is adjusted according to one’s non-ownership of the above.

• BPL is a state-determined category that calculates the degrees of deprivation. The Tenth Planning Commission fixed seven ‘parameters’. Kerala has nine parameters, while Haryana has five parameters to identify families in regard to ownership of land and access to employment, education level, status of children, sanitation, roof, floor, safe drinking water, transportation, food, ownership of colour TV, fridge and so on. In addition, there is an income cap which varies and is adjusted according to one’s non-ownership of the above.

• However, what remains undiscussed and therefore invisible is the multiple forms in which caste maintains its sanctity and pushes its agenda through every aspect of human life in India.

• Weekly, a cleaner from the Mehtar, Mahar or Maang caste (employed by the city corporation through a Brahmin/Bania sub-contractor) would manually clean the canal and put the slime that consisted of people’s leftover food, shit, bathwater and all kinds of human and animal waste in the open for two to seven days. It would then harden and be difficult to remove. Crawling babies often ended up playing on this mountain of sewerage.

• They never had what one would call a ‘job’ their entire lives. All they had was enslavement without a guarantee of fair returns.

• After one of my lectures on caste and race in Indian and African university campuses at Yale, I was asked by an Indian-American sophomore, ‘How do you identify one’s caste?’ He paused—a moment of silence followed, and the appalled gaze of his classmates stunned him.

• Caste as a social construct is a deceptive substance, known for its elemental capacity to digress from its primary motive of existence that governs this oldest system of human oppression, subjugation and degradation.

• Caste as a social construct is a deceptive substance, known for its elemental capacity to digress from its primary motive of existence that governs this oldest system of human oppression, subjugation and degradation. Originated in the Hindu social order, it has infiltrated all faiths on the Indian subcontinent.

• Caste in India is an absolute sanction—of the dominant class over the dominated.

• As I grew older I became extremely sensitive and was constantly looking for hints of injustice or mockery being hurled at me.

• As soon as I realized that I had been unjustly treated I would become sad and agitated. Other memories of similar mistreatment would immediately flash in my mind like lightning.

• Dominant-caste parents casually stereotype the Dalit classmates of their children, endorsing the popularly held belief of Dalit criminality as a paramount defence of their casteist attitude. Due to this, a Dalit individual has to live his/her life in marked isolation or anonymity

• Those who enjoy the privileges of caste never want to attack an abhorrent system as that would threaten their position of power.

• Many in this category offer ‘merit’ as a justification for this attitude without paying attention to their privileges that add up to the creation of ‘merit’, which is then considered ‘impartial’. Their cultural and social capital becomes ‘merit’. And therefore, anyone lacking access to these avenues is judged against their predetermined merit.

• Many in this category offer ‘merit’ as a justification for this attitude without paying attention to their privileges that add up to the creation of ‘merit’, which is then considered ‘impartial’.

• Currently, numerical scores are taken as an arbitrary measure of a person’s ability to study further, notwithstanding the fact that merit is an outcome and not representative of something.

• In businesses and most other careers, caste networks play a significant role. They are nothing but euphemisms for caste nepotism.

• Indian caste society has willingly embraced its violent

• Is there a lexicon that gathers the experiences of such an unexplainable act? I am yet to find it. It remains the marked tattoo that I carry unwillingly—that is why caste matters.

• The idea of difference forms the bedrock of discrimination, and thus, despite the commonality of caste as a defining category—Ambedkar referred to this as a ‘cultural unit[y]’8—there is a strong sense of grouping amongst the members of each caste, sub-caste and sub-sub-caste.

• India is not yet a nation. It is still in an improvisational mode like a jazz band that needs to perform repeatedly together in order to uplift every voice in the chorus.

• However, beyond the physicality of the nation state, India is a very loosely knit community.

• However, beyond the physicality of the nation state, India is a very loosely knit community. Barring its Constitution, nothing ties its citizens to each other.

• Ambedkar had presciently observed that each caste is a nation in itself as each caste has its own caste-consciousness that did not help to form a fellowship of national feeling.

• The people enjoying the benefits of their caste always direct the attention of suffering people towards the state, thus diverting from the real reason for their troubles, which is the existence of the caste system.

• And the common citizen who is suffering at the hands of dominant-caste nationalism buys into the false propaganda and effectively becomes the martyr of someone else’s national imagination.

• Thus, the ‘nationalistic’ feeling has to be constantly manufactured by the ruling classes to obscure the divisions, often seeking opportunities to display their angst. Due to this, India continues to be a nation of repeated riots and atrocities imposed by one caste nation upon another.

• The fact is simple—everyone has agreed to the liberal ethos of democracy, and the grievances of their hostilities are resolved by making society culturally, socially and economically equal. In India, the privileged would protect their free privilege to the death, fearing that a dialogue on equality might lead to questions about their unjust position in society.

• Such a projection of the country helps the traditional elite to easily assemble a ‘caste-neutral’ definition of the nation state while on the other hand continuing to hold diehard loyalties to its caste nation. This is visible with the number of their caste folks being incorporated and promoted—through the euphemism of ‘networking’—into positions of power in the government, bureaucracy, judiciary, education, film, entertainment, non-government, academia and capitalist enterprises.

• The institutions of films, academia, theatre, business, religion and bureaucracy remain enamoured with caste pathology, imposing physical and mental harm upon the lower-caste subjects in the graded hierarchy. This affects the ability to understand the Indian problem, which is a caste problem—therefore, caste matters.

• The society and the Dalit have been juxtaposed to co-opt Dalits into the imperial project of Hindu globalism. It is similar to the proclamation of the US ‘empire’, where Black slaves were the constituent elements in forming the country.

• A Brahmin is to an Untouchable what the master is to a slave.

• As the German philosopher Martin Heidegger observed, there is no absolute, existential ontology of time.

• Many affluent Dalits restrict their coterie to the world of Brahmins and other dominant castes. They spitefully denounce every arrangement of Dalitness.

• The Constitution of India is regarded as the foremost document for Dalit hope. However, does it specify the ingredients for emancipation? How has the Indian state confined the possibilities of its progress on the basis of Dalit hope?

• Simply put, the hope of the state continues to function adjacent to Dalit hope, both intangible and virtuous. The day Dalit hope ends, the state’s hope for Dalits will end.

• I live in a world that is Brahmin and Brahminical. Everywhere I turn my head, I see Brahmins and Brahminical segments in positions of power, undeterred and unwilling to acknowledge their status of privilege that nurtures the unaccountability of their actions.

• I am not a human, I am a Dalit. I am not a colleague; I am a Dalit. I am not a friend; I am a Dalit. I am not a co-maker of the moment; I am a Dalit. A Brahmin lives to exclude Dalits from his life.

• I have to live a twofold life—one for myself and the other for Brahmins and their Brahminical world.

• One such snippet was a review of a documentary by noted film-maker K. Stalin, titled India Untouched. When I watched it, nineteen minutes into the film, I couldn’t hold myself together.

• As I am walking, the mind is stunted and I am constantly thinking about the repeated assaults on Dalit minds that force them to inferiorize their being. I decide to counter this by disowning the terms ‘lower’ and ‘upper’. In my article ‘Why Not Lower Caste?’ that I published on the same portal soon after, which later got republished in an online human rights magazine, I argue that like the radical Black movement in the US where colour-coded stereotypes were upended by challenging the cruel White gaze, the Dalit ownership of the self has to be foregrounded by rejecting upper–lower signifiers.

• In my article ‘Why Not Lower Caste?’ that I published on the same portal soon after, which later got republished in an online human rights magazine, I argue that like the radical Black movement in the US where colour-coded stereotypes were upended by challenging the cruel White gaze, the Dalit ownership of the self has to be foregrounded by rejecting upper–lower signifiers. I furthermore argue in the piece that such downward-looking hierarchical terms should be completely eliminated, for doing that not only offers psychological independence but also paves the way for rightful Dalit assertion.

• Caste is an anti-fellowship institution. It does not encourage the sentiment of commonality, of fellow feeling; rather, it encourages belonging to distinct, individual hierarchical groups.

• I used to put up posts on Facebook condemning the caste system for atrocities against Dalits. As soon as my updates started to show up on their timelines, some of them blocked me, while those who were relatively closer to me did not engage with the posts.

• All this had erupted because I had made a presentation on the subject of ‘Caste and Gender within Indian Society’ for my international human rights course.

• I later recalled the experiences of Ambedkar, who was never welcomed into the private quarters of his dominant-caste friends. In his autobiographical account, Waiting for a Visa, Ambedkar describes his experience in Baroda, where he had been offered a job but no accommodation.

• However, Dalits are not a mono-identity, and the perception of them being so creates an additional burden on Dalit Being.

• Dalits do not often talk about caste; rather, they live their lives in the caste debacle.

• Before we analyse the Dalit condition and the catastrophe that is the caste system, we need to understand the collective experience of Dalit survival. What has enabled the Dalit community to survive amidst the generations of inferiority imposed upon their minds?

• Having the courage to agree to a dialogue with the oppressor as well as a firm commitment to resolve conflict is integral to Dalit Humanity.

• The primacy of Dalitness emerges in its innate capacity to cultivate self-love in the bareness of apathy and tragedy.

• Even after chronic episodes, the community manages to get past its historical scars and nurtures younger generations to act with empathy, love and compassion towards others.